Dorotea (Doris) Baričević was born in Graz (Austria) in 1923. She attended elementary and secondary schools in Zagreb. She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy, Zagreb University, majoring in art history and classical archaeology in 1948.
Her first job was as a volunteer in the Plaster Cast Collection - Gipsoteka - of the City of Zagreb, at the Collection of Fine Arts Archives (up to 1949), where she later received a fulltime job. When the Archive split off from the Yugoslav Academy in 1953, Baričević remained in it and worked as curator.
In 1960 the Archive was annexed to the History Institute of the Yugoslav Academy, and Doris Baričević was employed as assistant in the institute. She retired in 1993 in the rank of scientific adviser. As early as 1979 the Archives of the Yugoslav/Croatian Academy were made subordinate to the Architecture and Town Planning Office.
Doris Baričević devoted the whole of her working life to the study of the Baroque sculpting and woodcarving monumental heritage of inland Croatia, evaluating it within the framework of the CE sculptural heritage as an equal segment of the CE Baroque. She also learned photography, and created for the Collection of the Archives for Fine Arts the must systematic and complete photographic documentation about the Baroque sculpture of NW Croatia. She also arranged and managed the valuable collection of exhibition catalogues, and pursuant to archival material and visual documentation supplemented the biographies of artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
She investigated materials in Austria, Slovenia and Germany, as well as in the Archiepiscopal Archives in Zagreb. She wrote a master’s dissertation on Pulpits of the 17th century in NW Croatia, which she expanded, so that it became the basis for the successful doctoral dissertation Baroque Religious Sculpting of the 17th and 18th century in NW Croatia, in 1972. In her work she often made use of literature she found in Austria or south Germany, for no one had dealt systematically with this topic previously in Croatia. Particularly worth stressing is that this work needed a sound knowledge of Latin and German, for the ability to read the old documents and files, and for constant field work in the libraries of Vienna, Graz and elsewhere.
At the moment Dorotea Baričević is arranging her materials for a book - a kind of chronology of her research efforts. She also has material collected for monograph publications of Baroque sculptors who worked in NW Croatia.

NB. Data taken from the questionnaire, material taken from the Personnel Archives of the MDC, and from an interview recorded on February 13, 2003.